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Saturday, February 7, 2015

Apeocalypse now

A friend posted this on Facebook:

She asked "Can I make the "ape-ocalypse" pun and still be
scientifically accurate?" and tagged me, as I am her guru for this.

Short answer: Yes.

Long answer:

Yes, but you must be talking about any combination of: humans, chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans (aka the Great Apes) or Gibbons (aka the Lesser Apes), for these are the apes. (You can see our extended family tree over at OneZoom).

Colloquially ape can mean "any primate except humans", but as can be seen this is not accurate. For our primate cousins to be included we would need far less catchy alternatives such Primatocalypse (which would involve the primates: Lemurs, Tarsiers, Old World Monkeys, Apes and New World Monkeys) or Simianocalypse (which would be all the moneys and apes, simians being Old or New World Monkeys and Apes).

People often don't realise that we Homo sapiens aren't just like apes, we *are* apes. A fantastic book to look at our ape heritage is The Incredible Unlikeliness of Being by Alice Roberts. Given that we are apes, one could argue for two reasons that we are, right now, in the middle of an apeocalypse: